Why corporate business blogs are important to your marketing strategy

May 6, 2008 at 5:50 pm (Blogging, Social Media Marketing) (, , , , , )

Keyboard ImageIt is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes - to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers. But if your business has put off starting a blog for far too long, here is why you should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to your overall business marketing strategy.

Human face
You don’t really want people to think of your company as “big box” or “typical corporate America”. And blogging can actually put a human face to your company, since the company now has a voice it can relate to when it reads your blog. When you consider how much money companies put into creating a human face for their business, doing it with a company blog is a relatively inexpensive way to humanize your corporation.

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored. If there is a scandal or other negative publicity surrounding your company, you already have a platform ready to release information that doesn’t involve sending press releases to the media or subjecting your CEO or other employees to a press conference.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it. Since press releases are rarely sent to announce something your company hasn’t done yet, a blog is an easy way to get the word out and build anticipation.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Soft selling
Now, you don’t want to do a hard sell in your company blog, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with soft selling products or services in a blog… in fact, many readers will expect it. Just don’t go overboard with every post being promotional in nature. But it can be a great way to market your products, particularly ones that people might not be as familiar with, whether lower sellers or simply new to the market.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry. And since blogging is such a low-cost marketing strategy compared to paid advertising, you are saving money to place your identity in front of people.

For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies. As long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool.

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Where Bloggers Get Their Biggest Levels of Traffic

May 5, 2008 at 10:38 pm (Blogging, Google, SEO, Social Media Marketing) (, , , , , , , , , , , , , )

Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs.

The results reveal a fairly striking winner - Google.

Traffic-Sources

The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing - but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results.

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Are Bloggers Really Putting their Health at Risk?

May 5, 2008 at 10:34 pm (Blogging) (, , , , , )

Doctor ImageDarren posted a timely response a few weeks ago to the NY Times article that talked about bloggers blogging until they drop.

Despite the fact that some readers felt the subject was over-hyped – and quite rightly pointed out that blogging isn’t necessarily any more or less stressful than many other jobs – you don’t have to be a medically-qualified doctor to notice that many bloggers have extremely unhealthy habits…erratic sleep patterns, junk-filled diets, overloading on caffeine, no exercise.

The previous “healthy blogging” posts I’ve posted here on Problogger have yielded some excellent advice and collective wisdom from readers. Here are some of those nuggets:

On balance:

Courtney
“I find that my blogging is a lot better when I maintain balance. That means I need to work out, eat right, and maintain healthy, social relationships. Once I let myself get out of whack, my blogging starts to suffer because I’m not as happy.”

Sheamus
“I’d file the ‘risk’ of ill-health to blogging alongside the scares surrounding people playing video games excessively; while the odd freak person might do it to a point where they get ill (or worse), for most (normal) folk it won’t even be an issue. It’s always a balance; everything is 50/50.”

David
“I think it’s all about balance. An addiction to anything is usually unhealthy, as it pushes other healthy aspects out of your life. It can be blogging or playing worlds of warcraft. You can even be addicted to exercise, for crying out loud.”

On what to eat & drink:

Lance
“I’d also like to stress the importance of staying away from processed foods and drinks. It is so easy to grab a can of cola and a bag of chips as a quick snack to curb the hunger, and quickly get back to the online networking frenzy. Give your body the nutrients it is begging for, not the processed chemically synthesised junk foods that have zero nutritional value!”

NoCaf4Me
“Tea, coffee, cola, energy drinks and chocolate share the same nerve toxin (stimulant), caffeine. Caffeine, which is readily released into the blood, triggers a powerful immune response that helps the body to counteract and eliminate this irritant. The toxic irritant stimulates the adrenal glands, and to some extent, the body’s many cells, to release the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol into the blood stream.”

Evan Hadkins
“If you battle to know what is healthy for you probably the best thing to do is keep a food diary. On one side of the page you record EVERYTHING that goes into your mouth. On the other side how you feel - you can use a scale 1 for great to 5 for poor to make it easier.”

On stress:

Foxnomad
“It’s better (for you and the people around you) to make it a business. Set hours for work and define your objectives. Ever since I began doing this a few months ago I’ve produced better quality posts. The extra free time also made my relationships with other people and commitments smoother…”

Tish
“If the content isn’t flowing freely from my head through my fingers, I need to do something else for awhile and go back later. I use the same “walk away” strategy when I become frustrated with the technology I’m trying to use. Sometimes I leave it for a couple of days and when I get back to it, things magically come together.”

JQK
“Stress can nip away at our health without our even realizing it. Being in a prolonged battle with an undefeatable opponent is among the worst of stressors. When a blog is allowed to be viewed as an ‘opponent’, to be conquered, it can be devastating, over time. I try to see it as a friend, a demanding one perhaps, but a friend nevertheless. A friend that I enjoy spending time with…on my terms. The key factor is enjoyment, when my blog turns on me, as it sometimes does, it is no longer enjoyable or healthy..it’s time to walk away…for awhile (guilt free).”

On exercise & posture:

Rainmaker
“For me, exercise is critical to clear thinking. I can get totally engrossed in what I’m writing for hours and days. One of the best things I do is instead of grabbing that mid-day caffeine, I take a brisk walk for about 30 minutes. The problem is dragging myself out of the chair to do it. The trick I learned is to set an alarm in my calendar for about 2pm. This does two things for me:

  1. I see it every time I look at the to-do list.. because, if it’s not there, I’ll totally forget to do it.
  2. It interrupts me with an alarm… AND I don’t turn off that alarm until I get up to walk (I may snooze it every 10 minutes for a couple of hours, but I won’t actually turn it OFF until I get up).

Melissa
“For stretching I try to stop every hour; stand up and use a jump rope to stretch out my upper back and chest. I take the jump rope and extend the rope above my head at shoulder’s length width and slowly I rotate my shoulders bringing the rope behind my back so it’s even with my shoulder blades. This is an amazing stretch…it can be a tad painful if you are really stiff but it will help open up your chest muscles and corrects your posture.”

On healthy habits:

*Miss Universe
“If possible, blog by a window. The natural air that trickles in does wonders for your lungs. Also the natural light is more harmonious that just florescent or incandescent. If there is too much sun, just pull down the shades , you will notice a nice glow that even makes your screen look better…”

Frugal Dad
“Blogging, like anything else, requires the discipline to stand up and walk away every now and then. I’ve fallen into the trap of writing, commenting and researching for hours on end. I try to force myself to stand up and walk around the house, or go outside for a brief walk, or spend some time with my family as a small break.”

Sharon Sarmiento
“Two things I find to be health lifesavers are:

  1. Taking a break every hour or so, to get up, eat a little something, walk around, go outside, stretch
  2. Changing my work schedule with the seasons so that I have more time to play outdoors.

Right now I’m doing a Springtime schedule that gives me free time between 8:30am and evening (I work in the early morning and the evening so the day is free). Experimenting with unconventional schedules is something that most of us can do, and it really helps with morale too!”

There is a clear link to your health and your success as a problogger; you just might not notice that link until your health is gone.

Lea Woodward blogs about life, business and a lifestyle of permanent travel.

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Using Twitter To Build and Engage Your Audience

May 5, 2008 at 10:07 pm (Blogging, Social Media Marketing, Twitter) (, , , , , , , , , , , )

twitter shirt

Twitter is a new social media service that is being used by many power bloggers to keep in touch with their audience on a more personal level. It is called “micro-blogging” and rests somewhere between Blogging and Email. The basic concept is that you can subscribe to get short and brief commentary in the form of live alerts from other members by SMS, Instant Messenger or Email. These people can send it to you via their mobile phone or IM. You too can become someone who others choose to follow and get updates from… but it is very hard to create a large fan following on Twitter from scratch, unless you already have a huge audience that subscribes to you blog. Twitter picked up in popularity around 2007.

By following many individuals on Twiter, you can get a very fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback. You can very easily follow thousands of users and listen and enter into conversations happening between multiple users at any point of time. By using Twitter actively, you can also push out messages to others and use it as a self promotion and marketing tool. Twitter can be used for both a professional and personal life, and its addictive - but once you understand how to use i, it can be a very effective tool.

Catch me on Twitter my URL is http://twitter.com/mediamavens and be the First to know everything, even before it is posted on this Blog….. Yes it’s Cool!

Definition from Wikipedia (skip this if you know this stuff already)

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email

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Using Twitter to Increase Readers and Make Friends

May 3, 2008 at 9:51 pm (Blogging, Social Media Marketing, Twitter) (, , , , , )

Twitter LogoLast week, I started reading more on how you can drive traffic to your website using Twitter. Several bloggers that I read use Twitter daily to help find new readers and meet new people. I really didn’t grasp it at first, but I definitely got sucked in to Twitter quickly.

For those who don’t know the Twitter factor, I will drop a few stats on you.

Last week, I started actively using Twitter. Not really to drive traffic to my site, but to find new blogs that I could personally read and start following.  Immediately, I noticed a huge traffic spike to the blog. So I decided to look into it a little further.

  • Since I started actively using Twitter (last week), I have increased my RSS subscribers by 32. This isn’t an unheard of increase, but I know that most of those new readers should stay around awhile.
  • My website views have increased by almost 300 hits a day. Once again, if you are a large blog, that might not seem like much. But for an upstart, that is quite a bit of traffic inflow.

Those are just the raw traffic numbers from the website. What I wasn’t expecting were the tons of compliments via Twitter, users going to my band websites from my About page and complimenting my music, and meeting several people who I have since had nice and meaningful conversations with. I have also found many, many new blogs which I have subscribed to and read daily.

So, how did I do it?

These are the steps I went through in order to build the traffic and increase my followers. There are a few people who look at these types of methods as spamming, but they key to it is to NOT spam, and use your newfound connections properly. I have yet to post a link in a tweet (which is a message) attempting to drive traffic to the website. I may from time to time, but this method works to build a grassroots following similar to how I used to promote my band on MySpace.  When I promoted my music on MySpace, I would find a similar artist to my music. I would go through and then attempt to add their friends and message them. The mindset was ‘If they like this artist, there is a better chance they would like my music than if I picked a random person off the street.’ Instead of spamming them, I would message them personally and ask them to check out my music. It worked well, until people took advantage of it and start spamming relentlessly. So far, I have found that not to be the case on Twitter. Here are the steps.

  1. Make sure you profile has up to date links. I made sure that the blog I wanted people to go to was the first link on the profile. In the biography section of the Twitter profile, I added a link to the websites About page. This way if people wanted to find out about me, it would take them to my blog. (Keep in mind, I do not have advertisements on my site, I am more interested in sending them to the website so they can see what I write about, and if they like the content, will add my site to their RSS reader. However, if you are displaying ads, this is a good way to increase hits and traffic)
  2. Find someone with a similar business or blog and attempt to add their followers. It seems pretty simple and it works fast. In my example, I immediately cruised over to the profile of Maki from DoshDosh. He has a wonderful social media blog, his writing is top notch, and I like his overall style. I went one by one and added every single follower. You can do it faster than you ever could add a MySpace friend. After I had added all his followers, I went to a few more profiles and added similar followers. My thinking is if someone is following another blog, they quite possibly could be interested in following my blog.
  3. Download and install an application to help manage Twitter. I personally use Twhirl. It helps me manage replies and messages in a chat like setup. It is great for responding to messages.
  4. Respond to every single message and tweet. You will get a fair amount of backlash from adding people so fast. The reason is because many assume that you will just be spamming them. Take interest and respond the messages. You will ease their mind and if they like your content and tweets, they may become a reader.
  5. Don’t spam incessantly. One thing I have noticed, is the people who spam get removed very fast. So if you intend on building long lasting relationships and not just quick traffic spikes, make sure not to spam.
  6. Give back as well as take. You will have an opportunity to meet a wonderful community and find many new friends and blogs. Make sure you give traffic and subscriptions back. I assure you that you will find something you’ll love.

I hope this continues and I am able to grow more relationships with bloggers!

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Did Digg Try to “Tigerproof” Their Course?

April 30, 2008 at 6:37 pm (Digg, Social Media Marketing) (, , , , , )

Tiger Woods Flexing The changes in the Digg algorithm over the last week have resulted in a lot of chatter among marketers, bloggers, and media.  Giving credit where credit is certainly due, I do think that Digg’s update definitely made it harder to push through non-organic popularity (read: spam).  In spite of these changes, my contention is that all these changes for “diversity” just make it harder for the littlest guy (the organic user) to participate in the process and it’s negatively impacted their product.

As Tiger Woods started winning tournaments and absolutely turned Augusta National into his personal playground, some tournament directors made the decision to “Tigerproof” their courses.  They started lengthening holes so that Tiger would have to hit long irons into greens rather than wedges.  This “Tigerproofing” was supposed to level the playing field again.

It was a phenomenal news story but it actually makes very little sense to anyone who has ever played competitive golf.  Sure, Tiger may have to go Driver -> 4-iron into a long par 4 now, but what about the other 95% of the Tour players that are faced with a par 4 that is essentially a par 5 for them now?  In the end, all this “Tigerproofing” did was favor Tiger and the longer players.  It’s all relative and a real “leveling” of the playing field would have been to shorten everything leaving everyone to score with wedges and putters (which, incidentally, Tiger probably still would have won as consistently).

So, when Digg raised the vote threshold to a pretty ridiculous standard for power accounts in the name of “diversity”, this was their attempt to “Tigerproof” their course from a select few users who had above average success in getting stories to the front page.  It’s a strategy that does hold some merit as many of those accounts were built by marketers or users with other agendas, but it’s also a slap in the face to many of their oldest contributors who never took a dime and acted as meta-guides to much of the content.

Additionaly, these changes made in the name of “diversity” has also produced the unfortunate side effect of killing the freshness factor of their product.  In the era of short news cycles and instant consumption, it is taking almost a full day for yesterday’s news to make the front page.  Somewhere, Matt Drudge is laughing.

Now, if you raise the bar to success at Digg, who do you think will adjust and adapt…organic users who get very little benefit or power marketers who are incented to generate Digg traffic?  Over the long haul, it’s going to be the power marketers (and the one or two organic users who maintain some sort of religious affinity to Digg, aka “the never touched bewbs” crowd).

I’ve seen this type of inflection at least three times in Digg’s history.  It generally takes us a few months to recover…but we always do.  We are incented by profit.  We adapt.  The large publishing partners that Digg is getting into bed with have no problem bringing “diversity”, so they will succeed.  And the people Digg probably wishes would be there best users are left out to dry with that knife in their back.

The other question I’m fielding a lot is, “How do you think this plays into their strategy to sell Digg?” First, it gives them something to point at when bigger, older media companies start talking about the risk of user generated ecosystems.  Secondly, it gets everyone talking about Digg again while they are soliciting buyers.  Thirdly, it certainly isn’t a coincidence that it drives many more page views for each session at Digg.  Crusty old media companies and advertisers love them some page views.

So, if you’re scoring at home:

1.  Good quality tweak.
2.  May impress acquirors of Digg.
3.  Because it appeases their risk models and page view appetites.
4.  But it pissed off their meta-users.
5.  And reinforced the chances for marketers over the long term.
6.  While ruining the “freshness” of their news.

I’m really not sure who wins here.  It’s certainly not bewbs.

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